I read somewhere: ‘we are born into this world alone and we die alone’. Seen from the ego’s 3-D perspective that statement could make some sense, but on all other levels it is a limited perception of what really goes on with us. There is a huge difference between being alone and feeling alone.

We are born alone? I would say it’s rather clear that our mother is present. We had her heartbeat to listen to for nine months in the uterus, and every sensible midwife would bring that baby, very fast, up to the mother’s chest in order for that baby to pick up the sound of the heartbeat. So we’re quite safe. We might come into this world with a scream… thinking, “Shit, the matrix!” But we are certainly not alone.

We die alone? No we don’t. We die in an abundance of souls who are ready to follow us into the afterlife. Tales of near death experiences have taken us to that information. What’s really interesting about the near death experience is that it is cross cultural; so people in France, people in the US, people in Bali, people in Africa… all have very similar experiences.

When something goes ‘cross culture’ I have to let down my guard and think there is maybe some truth in it. The conditioning is actually very, very different from a culture in Africa to a high school student in the US telling about being met by celestial helpers or relatives long gone.

So, with regard to being alone, I think we need to address what is the perception of the ego and what is the higher perception. If we go down the alone road, we certainly, certainly buy into the matrix of belief that there is nothing in this world to trust – nothing in this world that gives us togetherness.

Within a non-religious perspective, the most holy thing we have is knowing, deep down in our souls, that we are in this together.

It quite amazes me, the ‘alone’ belief system, because it contradicts the concept that we are all one – we are one consciousness – we are united. Those three statements, until they are perceived and lived through by our emotional software, are slogans. If we cling to them as slogans, and not as a perceived reality, but all ‘in theory’ – Well, that’s rather sad.

If the people, the pilgrims in this world heading toward the new dawn, are persuaded that they are alone while being amongst other people, we surely have met the matrix where it wants to meet us. We’ve crumbled up the perception of togetherness, synchronicity… which is the glue that holds the souls together in this 3-D reality we’re living in.

Did you notice how the same ‘ We are all One people’ often writes very degrading of either the ‘un-spiritual’ ( there is no such thing) or ‘Sheeple’. Well, how does the ‘We are all One’ align with that? It would be more honest to state: ‘Some of us are more One that Others’ – but who wants to go there, since it’s a contradiction. It is Elitism, showing its ugly face where it shouldn’t.

Some even write: ‘The reason you are reading this is that you are Awake’- really Bro??? I clicked the link by mistake! Wasn’t my fault. As I have said before – If this is the awakening, put me back to sleep.

Being in the matrix we will often translate intimacy into physical sensuality or sexuality. That’s just one fragment of it, and if we stare at that point we won’t understand the other levels of intimacy – the emotional intimacy, the intellectual intimacy.

Do we lack intimacy? My question would certainly be, do we lack the courage of intimacy and conscious vulnerability?

If we open that room of intimacy and say, “Listen, I’m so alone,” our partner may hear that as an attack, but our partner can also hear that as a cry for help. So it comes down to intimacy… it comes down to ego opinions. Because if people leave us, or if we leave people because we don’t buy into the mainstream fault system, that would spark feelings of being alone.

I’m not pointing towards the idea that we should always surround ourselves with like-minded people, but it certainly helps, like I pointed out in a previous article, we have to be very careful not to become elitist, but on the other hand we need to be cautious, very cautious about what we buy into.

We are starting to understand that there is something called spiritual depression, where we have our 40 days in the desert. But staying in that desert is not advisable. We can change what we acknowledge, so by knowing we’re in a desert we spark the need to change. It’s also a question of evolving – a question of when we leave the matrix behind: our ego will suffer and our soul will rejoice. It is the suffering of the ego in that tale – forty days without attaching to what intimacy you have within the matrix.

Walking on the evolving path certainly says that we are leaving but we are also arriving. I for one would think of it as a huge waste of time if my final goal on this path would be to understand that I’m all alone.I actually set out to understand that I wasn’t.

I don’t fear being alone because it’s an illusion. From a spiritual perspective it’s an illusion. From 4-D, 5-D it’s an illusion. And I would suppose that there are evolving people out here who have actually experienced that reality. There to another reality we go, and we attach, and there will be people there to satisfy our needs for intimacy.

I think we need to flip this coin of being alone together, being alone when we are born, and being alone when we die, and see the other side. As the Yoga Sutra said, every time we throw an emotion in the air there can be joy and we can also see the back side of it… sorrow… because we might lose the joy.

We need to become ever stronger in our states of mind, and we need not to put our perspective down in the matrix 3-D conditioning of ‘emotions are real’: emotions are illusions, they come and go. States of mind stay.

We are tied together by synchronicity and our path in life is determined by that synchronicity.

It can be quite challenging to have the courage to bond in intimacy, not only sensually but also with the mind and the emotional software. There is a huge difference between love and being in love. If I may, I would strongly advise you to fall in love with unity, with the celestial, the feminine spirits of this world, the masculine spirits of this world.

Love the beauty, and in beauty you rest… knowing… Alone: It’s The Last Thing You Are

It’s one of the biggest mysterious in human history: What happens when we die? Does ‘consciousness’ cease to exist, because it’s a product of the brain? Or does consciousness remain, because it does not require the brain or any other physical organ to exist? It’s hard to tell, because we don’t really have any specific tool for measuring consciousness, but things are changing. Non-material science is really starting to take giant leaps forward, and more studies are emerging every year suggesting that a persons’s consciousness continues to work after the body has died.

The newest one comes from a team from New York University’s Lagone School of Medicine. They investigated twin studies from Europe and the United States that looked at people who suffered cardiac arrest, flatlined, and then came back to life. We’re talking about people whose hearts have stopped; once this happens, blood no longer circulates to the brain, which means brain function is also completely dead.

As reported by Live Science, “The brain’s cerebral cortex — the so-called “thinking part” of the brain — also slows down instantly, and flatlines, meaning that no brainwaves are visible on an electric monitor, within 2 to 20 seconds. This initiates a chain reaction of cellular processes that eventually result in the death of brain cells, but that can take hours after the heart has stopped.”

The study, conducted in 2008, was the largest of its kind. It involved 2,060 patients from 15 different hospitals in the United Kingdom, United States, and Austria, and it emphasized the need for more studies of its kind to focus on cardiac arrest when asking these questions, because it is biologically synonymous with death.

The study found, as have several others, that many of these patients were still aware and able to see following their biological death, but from “outside” their body, so to speak.

The portion of the study that focused on UK cases, which was conducted over a four year period by researchers at the University of Southhampton, found that nearly 40% of people who survived described some type of ‘awareness’ during the time they were pronounced clinically dead, before their hearts were restarted.

For example, one patient, who was a 57 year old man at the time, despite being pronounced dead and completely unconscious, with no detectable biological activity going on, recalled watching the entire process of his resuscitation.

The study’s authors argue this “merits a genuine investigation without prejudice.”

When science examines non-material concepts such as this, it is often hindered by skeptics who are unable to set aside their beliefs in the quest for truth, which is perhaps why we have labels like “pseudoscience” draped upon concepts that have gone through rigorous investigation, and shown to be repeatable.

We know the brain can’t function when the heart has stopped beating. . . . But in this case conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to three minutes into the period when the heart wasn’t beating, even though the brain typically shuts down within 20-30 seconds after the heart has stopped.

The man described everything that had happened in the room, but importantly, he heard two bleeps from a machine that makes a noise at three-minute intervals. So we could time how long the experienced lasted for.

He seemed very credible and everything that he said had happened to him had actually happened.

He went on to emphasize the significance of these results, since this phenomenon has often been associated with hallucinations or illusions. Yet we now have proof this might not be the case.

Out of the approximate 2,000 cardiac arrest patients, a staggering 330 survived, and 140 of those 330 experienced some type of awareness during the time they were clinically, biologically dead.

According to Live Science, Parnia and his colleagues are continuing on with their investigations into consciousness after death, including observing the brain in detail during the period of cardiac arrest, death, and revival so they can better understand how much oxygen is actually reaching the brain.

Parnia says, “In the same way that a group of researchers might be studying the qualitative nature of the human experience of ‘love,’ for instance, we’re trying to understand the exact features that people experience when they go through death, because we understand that this is going to reflect the universal experience we’re all going to have when we die.”

The Problem of Consciousness

Fascinating, isn’t it? How could almost half of these patients experience awareness during death if something extraordinary weren’t going on here? There are two possible explanations — either they are experiencing something phenomenal, and consciousness does continue on after death, or the slight brain activity that is going on is creating the experience. The latter is harder to believe, given the fact that if there is any brain activity happening beyond our ability to detect it, it’s minuscule. How could so little brain activity provide such an experience? How do we even know that there is any brain activity at all given the fact that it cannot be measured? Remember, these people were biologically dead.

Michael Barbato is a retired palliative care expert who has seen hundreds of patients die during his decades in medicine.

Patrick Coghlan was dying. He was peaceful and motionless, and his daughter, Mairead O’Connor, sat by his bedside, knowing the end was not far.

Suddenly — shockingly — he roused from his unconscious state, sat bolt upright, opened his eyes wide, and waved at something or someone only he could see.

Mrs O’Connor likes to think it was her late mother.

“His face looked radiant and happy,” she remembers.

“I knew I was witnessing something special.”

Moments later, he died.

Patrick Coghlan pictured with grandson Rory days before he died.

For a long time, deathbed visions such as Mr Coghlan’s have been relegated to the realm of religion and superstition.

But increasingly, doctors are applying the rigours of science to a phenomenon they have seen too often to dismiss as the hallucinations of a failing mind.

One of those doctors is Australia’s Michael Barbato, a retired palliative care expert who has watched hundreds of patients pass away during his decades in medicine, and whose fascination with the mysteries of dying led him to conduct groundbreaking research into the behaviour of the brain at death.

Thirty patients at a Port Kembla hospital allowed palliative care researchers to put brain monitors on their head as they died, hoping to contribute to the scant knowledge of the dying brain. And the results are striking; they suggest that, for many people, the final seconds of life bring a last, powerful, surge of activity in the brain.

Mairead O’Connor, whose father had a deathbed vision, plays with grandson Tom O’Connor at home in Carss Park.

The resulting study, published this month in the Journal of Pain and Symptom management, found almost three quarters of the patients (73 per cent) had a spike in brain activity at the time of death.

“It is contrary to what one would expect,” said Dr Barbato.

“With impending death, the circulation slows, the heartbeat weakens, and the breathing gets slower or more irregular, but just as the heart beat and breathing case, the brain seems to have a burst of activity.”

Dr Barbato and his colleagues used bispectral (BIS) index monitoring, which is commonly used to measure sedation under anaesthetic. It has a 0-100 scale, where 100 is full awareness, 50 is deep sedation or sleep, and 0 is brain death.

Twenty-two patients had a spike from their baseline of an average 31 points. Ten of them had a spike of 40-50 points above their baseline. In only eight patients was the spike absent or smaller than 10 points.

“You see the line hovering at around 50, and all of a sudden it jumps to 80 or sometimes 90, almost consistent with the wide awake state, and then it drops right off to zero,” Dr Barbato said.

All patients had been given pain medication and none showed visible signs of awareness or discomfort.

Dr Barbato is cautious about his findings. More work, he says, is needed to show exactly what is happening. But these results, and evidence from other studies, suggest the spike might be due to a dream or vision.

“The only way to investigate this further is with a brain wave machine (EEG), although it would be hard to justify such a study involving dying patients,” he says.

“If other studies replicate our findings, then we should ask, ‘is this proof enough to conclude the surge is due to an end-of-life dream or vision, and if so, why do dreams and visions occur at the moment of death?'”

In 1926, deathbed visions crossed from superstition to science with a book by British Physicist William Barratt. He collected stories such as this one from a nurse who wrote about a woman suffering an aggressive and painful cancer.

“Suddenly her sufferings appeared to cease,” she said. “The expression on her face, which a moment before had been distorted by pain, changed to one of radiant joy. Gazing upwards, with a glad light in her eyes, she raised her hands and exclaimed, ‘oh mother dear, you have come to take me home. I am so glad!’ And in another moment, her physical life ceased.”

Deathbed visions, as described by Barratt and those who came after him, are different to near-death experiences, in which patients describe the sensation of leaving their body and being attracted to a bright light.

They are a comforting vision, often of friends or relatives, reassuring the patient that they will not be alone, and need not be afraid.

Palliative care expert Molly Carlile: “Talk to any nurse who has worked in palliative care for any period of time, and they will tell you stories about strange things.”

Barratt was one of the first to approach the subject scientifically, but it has taken another century for discussion of this subject — let alone clinical research into it — to be taken seriously by the medical community. Even now, many doctors and scientists consider the area too fringe, and too fraught.

“There’s a politics in science,” says Professor Allan Kellehear, an Australian-born expert and advocate in end-of-life care now working at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom.

“One of the big problems with deathbed visions and near-death experiences and visions of the bereaved, is they prompt a very old debate between people with religious beliefs and materialists.”

Prof Kellehear’s own investigations have been rigorously scientific. His peer-reviewed research estimates that one in three deaths involve a vision, although others put the rate at 40 to 50 per cent.

He does not believe the visions are hallucinations — why would so many people see dying relatives on their deathbed, and not at other times? — and he does not think medication causes them.

But he also believes there is no empirical evidence to back up the theory that a near-death vision is the last flush of a dying brain.

“I have been researching dying for 30 years, as part of palliative care research, and the honest scientific answer is that we don’t know what they are,” he says. “But it’s important to reassure family that these are usually comforting things.”

During 30 years in palliative care, as a nurse and educator, Molly Carlile has seen many things that would make a lay person’s hair stand on end.

“Talk to any nurse who has worked in palliative care for any period of time, and they will be able to tell you stories about strange things,” she says.

Just recently, Ms Carlile’s mother-in-law died. She had always been afraid of death, but as it approached, accepted it calmly.

“I am not scared, I can see a door,” she said. “Can’t you see it? There’s a door, and there’s a hole in it, and the hole is beautiful, it’s full of life. That’s the door I am going through.” Soon afterwards, she died.

“Academics might say it’s all a coincidence,” Ms Carlile said. “When those sorts of experiences happen for families, it gives them a sense of comfort, a sense of meaning. It eases the traumatic nature of death, so why would you question it?

“It’s okay not to understand why it happens. There doesn’t have to be a double blind randomised control trial on every human experience to prove its validity. If it’s someone’s experience, then it’s their experience.”

As a country GP then palliative care specialist, Dr Barbato has witnessed hundreds of deaths. He has often seen sudden, dramatic returns to consciousness in patients that had been unconscious for days — a bright smile, a sudden stare, an extended hand to an empty corner of the room, before the patient lies back, and breathes their last.

He has watched the dying greet long-dead relatives as though they are in the room. He has seen patients hold on to life for days, waiting for a loved-one to reach their bedside, and die minutes later.

And he has seen others, often mothers, let go when their child has left the room briefly, perhaps protecting them to the last.

“That to me is the biggest mystery, the moment of death,” says Dr Barbato. “I have had people just sit up, dramatically — they are hardly alive, and they will sit up, and look straight ahead, and stay like that, as if they are staring. Within minutes, they will lie back again, and die.

“It is as though at the moment of death, something happens.”

These questions fascinate Dr Barbato. Why do we have visions as we die? Why do they happen to some, and not others? Is our subconscious somehow programmed to comfort us at the moment of our greatest uncertainty?

“I am not out to solve this mystery, but what I and my colleagues are trying to do is to learn more about dying,” he says.

“That’s the big question,” he says. “My belief is it does represent an alteration in the state of consciousness, rather than the agonal throes of a dying brain.

“What is happening in the unconscious to bring this experience to the fore in the moment of death?

Dr Barbato hopes there will be more studies on how the brain responds to death. Not to solve the mystery, but to help doctors understand dying so they can help patients and families better prepare for it.

Research is just a small part of Dr Barbato’s vocation. He was attracted to palliative care after the loss of his baby daughter, Moira, to SIDS, almost 40 years ago, an experience that still leaves his eyes teary and his voice shaking.

Now, having retired from clinical practice, he runs courses called Midwifing Death, hoping to teach carers how to support the dying, which, in its essence, involves being attuned to the needs of the dying person, and supporting them in the kind of death they want.

After a life devoted to death, Dr Barbato doesn’t believe in life after death — but he doesn’t reject the possibility, either.

“We are dealing with something that’s beyond rational thought,” he says. “I think the question of life after death is unknowable in its mystery. We will only know when we die.”

One thing Dr Barbato does know, however, is this. “If I have a vision when I die, if a hand is reaching out to me, I want it to be Moira’s.”

This is Sha’Tara. I was going to comment on this previous article:
The deepest reason why we are afraid of death, but decided to post additional thoughts on it instead. For your reference, here’s the article, my thoughts below.

“Perhaps the deepest reason why we are afraid of death is because we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity — but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our “biography,” our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit cards… It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?

Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn’t that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?” ― Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

To the person who has faced death; who has interfaced with the terminal aspect of life on a material world; who has seen that it is more than a physical body, the above seems very familiar, yet no longer applicable. I will speak in the first person, I, me, because I have experienced the state known as “near death experience” and seen life the way many can never see, or could but refuse to. I have seen life as a non-physical entity, as a fully functional mind being.

Additional thoughts:
Indeed, before I entered my spiritual journey I was the person you read about above, Rinpoche’s normal human being. I remember a rage to live, to experience as much of physical sense satisfaction as possible, and a gnawing fear that somehow this would be denied me, or taken from me. From what I see of people around me, this is very much the case with most Earth-based people. They need “stuff” to give their lives solidity, and they need money to do things so they can add to their own, personal, experiences of life. I sense great dissatisfaction in their awareness that no matter how much they accumulate of things and experiences, there will be those who will have more; there will be some they crave and won’t be able to get because they lack the means, or their current lifestyle prevents them from attaining to a greater (and entitled) greater sense of material self.

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They will be unhappy. Unsatisfied. Unfulfilled. Incomplete. They will go about casting blame for this condition. They will resent the very things that currently define who they are: their families, their jobs, their responsibilities. They will have a bucket list in the back of their minds and it will eat at them. Often enough they will suddenly ditch their life-long responsibilities to lunge after the promises in their bucket. And they will find chimeras.

For some of us “lucky” ones, we get a reprieve from this private hell. We are allowed to “die” and see a different and much expanded vista: the real worlds of the mind. And for some of those, the “lesson” learned is accepted, kept and put to use when we return to our little physical reality.

I need to say this because it is crucially important: no one needs to experience “NDE’s (Near Death Experiences) or even OBE’s (Out of Body Experiences) to become aware of what I’m talking about. Those esoteric experiences are for particularly stubborn and dumb types who won’t get it any other way but who somehow show promise and a propensity for things of the mind and of spirit. To attempt NDE’s or OBE’s to gain spiritual insight is ridiculous, since the fact such is sought indicates you are ready to make the mental transition or jump!

Transitioning into the spirit/mind realm means encountering your greater (higher) or more real and complete self. This is why it is important to do so. This greater self can and does function quite well without ANY of the normal attachments and clap-trap that defines the Earth-based self. It can function as a self-empowered, totally detached entity. It can decide everything about itself, including, and note, if and whom, it will love.

Most reading this will know already what “falling in love” entails. For me it always was an upsetting and confusing process that invariably left me the loser. Imagine my surprise when in my greater self to realize I could choose whether to love someone, and how that loving would be expressed. I was in control, imagine that. If there was passion, I allowed it to take place. If there was a cooling from the other, I accepted it and used that time for other pursuits. If the cooling went to freezing point, I accepted the dissolution as something completely normal. I could after all have a similar relationship with anyone else should I want one. None of it mattered. Would it shock you to read that the person you “do it with” isn’t in the least important, what’s important is the experience. Go ahead, dare admit that and break another Matrix programming link in the chain.

Imagine the same thing about work, about money, about any relationship. I was in control of my whole life even in the midst of storms. I knew I wouldn’t drown because there is no such thing. I would have a new experience to work with.

And so it is to this day. I’ve gone through “stuff” in the last twenty years that I know would have crushed or devastated many a “normal” Earthian because of attachments, expectations, sense of entitlement.

The common question, “Why is this happening to me?” is not asked by the spirit/mental intelligent, sentient, self aware entity because “this” isn’t relevant to its life. What’s relevant is “that” as in, taking in the cosmos in infinity.

(title is a remembered quote from the movie, “Lord of War”)[thoughts from ~burning woman~ through Airin WilloWitch, a.k.a., Sha’Tara]

I’m sure that title and quote is also a paraphrase of something else I’ve read somewhere in my travels. It is a line however that I have often thought about. What does that mean to me? Does it mean, in the hedonistic biblical sense, “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die!”? Throw caution to the wind, live for the moment, and the Devil take the hindmost? (Or the lion if you happen to be a wildebeest?)

While I completely disagree with the common politically correct phrase, “we’re all in this together” (which is obvious bullshit in spades when you think about it seriously for a split second) there is definitely one thing we all have in common: death. Whatever we do to avoid it, and believe me that the amount of money people spend to try to avoid it is beyond staggering (well, OK, I don’t know how much, I just know it’s a whole lot more than that), we simply can’t. Death is our constant companion through life. We’re born to die, with a little lunch break in-between we call life.

No, I’m not trying to cheer you up, but I’m not trying to depress you either as both would defeat my purpose. I haven’t (yet) said anything you don’t already know so if this feels uncomfortable, think of it as a reality check – and try to make sure it doesn’t bounce. Hell hath no fury like the Devil holding a bounced check and you could be looking at a fate worse than death – but I’m ahead of myself here and I hate it when I have to keep looking back while writing, it’s so hard on the neck.

Two questions arise from the above: why worry? And what is death? And from that let’s extract this gem: is all of our worry concerned with the possibility that we may die, suddenly and inexplicably, or that we may be driven to death by any number of means or reasons: bankrupted into abject poverty; contracting an incurable, terminal disease; arrested for murder and though not guilty convicted of same in a death penalty state; accident?

So, why do we worry? Why are so many people stressed to the max and depressed today? What happened to the real, un-faked happiness, the verve, the “joie de vivre”? What is this terrible darkness that is descending upon the planet and which seems to only increase every time some major man-made event happens? Why can’t we have at least one major truly joyful man-made event of gargantuan proportions to celebrate ourselves within, as a species? Why must everything of major import be sad, dreadful, horrible, hopeless, destructive, death-dealing, polluting with no end in sight when we are sick and tired of hearing all about it, or of experiencing it? Or, why, if we are of the hopeful types, must what we hope for be forever out of reach, more often receding from our grasp than approaching it? Why does the carrot always turn into a stick?

I think it all goes back to death. Consciously we may choose to ignore the monster and try to live relatively normal, happy lives among those we love or the society we fit in, but subconsciously “it” is always there, just like *Joe Black, not always recognized for what it is but suspected, distrusted and feared; the entity with its own agenda over which no one has any control. Death, the great equalizer it’s been called. Well, I don’t know: I see a lot of death, I don’t see much equality arising from its presence, quite the contrary. Death is like that bouncing ball that after it’s set a bouncing, every time it’s touched it bounces even more wildly and unpredictably.

In a moment of wild ecstasy I suppose, John Donne wrote “death thou shalt die.” Literally or figuratively? It really doesn’t matter how, it matters more when. Until now man has been the slave of death and the certainty of having to face that executioner has caused man to behave in very irrational and contradictory ways. For the average Earthian, the way to avoid death is to be the first to deal death to some whose existence is perceived as a threat. This knee-jerk reaction is called war, man’s most precious invention. The one he spends the most resources upon by far; his joy, his baby, his heritage. Makes me want to write an ode to war, or a love poem: “O dear war, how I missed thee in the dark hours of peace and how I praise thee now that thee are back, filling that aching void in my human heart, O dear war promise, O promise me thou shalt never abandon me again, I could not bear it!” Well, that’s a start. Dark humour, but how far from the truth of the matter? So we kill in a vain attempt to save our own life, a life that was forfeit from the moment we were conceived.

OK, so I’m not looking for rationality among the species, I know such a thing is anathema to man’s thinking. I’m just wondering if there is a cure to worry. Let’s spread the net. All animal life dies, sooner than later, here. Do animals worry about dying? I don’t think they do, although many animals experience powerful emotions when one of them dies, some more than others. They know about death; about the end of the body, but they don’t seem to be worried about their own coming death. It’s only when the predator appears that they resort to their fight or flight mode. And if they get sick they do not linger. Either they can heal themselves or they quickly give themselves over to death without any struggle.

For whatever reason, Earthians are very different from the animals in the matter of death. Animals don’t form armies to attack and decimate their enemies. They may be territorial for logistical purposes but they don’t try to expand their “empires” outside limits set by the Alpha male of the tribe. Those outside the limits are safe from attack and free of harassment. Animals kill to survive, not to enhance their own personal power or “wealth” as the expense of others. {Oh please God, make me into an animal this minute! Amen!} Animals do not cling to life when evidence shows the game is up: they gracefully surrender their bodies to the earth and very quickly no evidence remains of their passage.

It is foolish to worry, even more so to allow oneself to get depressed. Depression isn’t a disease, it’s the dirty diaper of the spoiled and entitled modern bratty human who wants more than it’s willing to get for itself or share and give to others. Depression comes from a “I want it, and I want it now” civilization whose technology provided a lot of stupid, unnecessary and polluting toys and that continues to promise even more toys while the natural resources that fueled that technology are being wasted by overuse and war or vanishing from the planet in waves of entropic energy like climate change. Depression from not getting what one feels entitled to leads to worry about more serious things, like losing one’s home or having no money to buy basic necessities such as food or losing one’s children through violence… Ah yes, the list of things that cause worry is long indeed.

So, I choose to live by my first quote. I don’t worry about what could kill me tomorrow. I think about the things lurking in the night of my mind, the things tonight, that can kill me. I think about the dangers of reverting back to being a common Earthians; of waking up tomorrow morning worrying about food, clothing, shelter, money, what’s been stolen in the night, etc. I think about spiritual regression and mental devaluation from nightly visitations of “demons” from the darkness of the Matrix. I think of the horror of discovering I’m no longer immune to the foibles of man but rather fully back in their clutches. I think about what it would be like to lose my sense of self empowerment, of knowing what I am; of losing sight of my purpose… in the night. And I shudder. That would be worse than any conceivable depression.

Ah, but I’m a witch! I have spells to protect myself from demons who would steal my self-made personhood: “I think my own thoughts, therefore I am my own person.” And spells also to protect me from well-meaning Earthians who would also destroy me with their verbal weapons of mass distraction: “I Choose Me.” And then I remember that death is a gift, my doorway out of this place and to another I know about and look forward to – and no, sorry, it’s not heaven! And when does death die? It dies for me when I kill it by transcending it every moment of every day.

*Joe Black: reference is to the movie, Meet Joe Black, with Brad Pitt as death.

In a chilling turn of events, some taxi drivers in Japan are claiming to have picked up ‘ghost passengers’ in the aftermath of the tsunami that devastated the nation in March 2011. As many as seven of the 100 drivers interviewed by Yuka Kudo, a student of sociology at Tohoku, admitted to having encountered phantom fares.

Kudo conducted the interviews as a part of her graduation thesis, traveling to the coastal town of Ishinomaki every week for a year to speak to taxi drivers waiting for fares. She asked over 100 drivers the same question: “Did you have any unusual experiences after the disaster?” Many of them ignored her, some even got angry, but seven drivers agreed to describe their strange encounters.

One driver recounted a particularly unsettling story – in the summer of 2011, a woman dressed in a coat climbed into his taxi near Ishinomaki station. She said, “Please go to the Mianmihama Station.” When he pointed out that there was nothing left standing in the district, she asked him in a shivering voice, “Have I died?” The driver immediately turned around, only to find the back seat empty.

Another driver recalled how a young man who looked to be in his 20s got into his taxi. When the driver looked in the rear-view mirror for directions, the man kept pointing towards the front. The driver then asked for a destination, to which he replied, “Hiyoriyama” (mountain). When the taxi reached the area, the man had disappeared from the taxi.

It’s easy to dismiss these stories as hallucinations or imaginations, but the drivers’ logs are proof that they really might have occurred. When these ‘ghosts’ got into their cabs, the drivers started the meter, which is recorded. So even though these passengers disappeared during the ride, they were still counted as clients. The drivers then had to pay their fares out of their own pockets. Some of the drivers even wrote down their experiences in their logs.

All these phantom travelers were described to be young, which compels Kudo to believe that they were indeed victims of the 2011 tsunami. “Young people feel strongly chagrined (at their deaths) when they cannot meet people they love,” she said. “As they want to convey their bitterness, they may have chosen taxis, which are like private rooms, as a medium to do so.”

Interestingly, none of the drivers reported feeling any fear, instead holding their special passengers in reverence. Having lost loved ones in the disaster themselves, they perceived the encounters as a spiritual experience, meant to be remembered and cherished forever. “It is not strange to see a ghost here,” a driver said. If I encounter a ghost again, I will accept it as my passenger.”

Kudo herself was moved by the interviews. “I learned that the death of each victim carries importance,” she said. “I want to convey that to other people.”

According to official records, over 15,000 people died during the magnitude-9 earthquake that lasted for six minutes and triggered a 133-ft high tsunami that swept six miles inland. Numerous sightings of ‘ghosts’ and ‘spectral figures’ have been reported in residential districts in the affected areas in the aftermath of the disaster.